Since this five-week course by Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University officially ended this week, I guess I should write a few words on it as I usually do. I’m more reticent than usual about this because it turned out to be a rather bland course about a very narrow subject: how Hollywood depicts the institution of marriage in its films and whether this has changed over time and if so, how.

Part of the problem is that it was always a very unambitious subject for a course. As the professor herself states early on and reinforces at the end, marriage movies aren’t even considered an established genre of film. The reason for this is obviously that even though these movies have always been omnipresent, they’re not really considered interesting enough or important enough. In other words, marriage movies aren’t the stuff of great cinematic works.

But it’s also bland because Basinger’s observations and conclusions, while generally interesting in the sense all that bits of trivia are interesting, don’t seem to be especially insightful. Listing all of the problems that can exist in a marriage movie for example is rote work that doesn’t pave the way for a more substantial conversation. I also feel that her presentation contributes to the sense of blandness. She repeats herself too much, often uses the adjective “interesting” to describe what she is saying rather than persuading us why we should think so and comes across too clearly as reading from a prepared script. Apart from the film clips, there also aren’t any supplemental materials. No posters of films for example, or still images, or even slides showing the text of books or passages from the Hays Code that she reads from.

What I find to be of most value to me from this course is the introduction of a large number of films that may well have their individual merits but aren’t significant enough for me to actually go out of my way to watch. I note however she tends to basically give spoilers for all of the films covered, which I think might offend some people. Compare this to for example The Language of Hollywood course which is actually rather careful about spoilers except when the outcome is blatantly obvious, especially when talking about films the course hasn’t assigned.

I won’t say this is a bad course. You do learn some things from it and the video lectures take little enough effort to follow. It’s just that I’d hoped for something more intellectually stimulating. As far as I know this and the previously mentioned course from the same university are still the only two courses on American film on the Coursera platform. Hopefully there will more and better ones to come.